The old man considered awhile: "Take any one state, any city, or country locality, and study back a little," he said, "and you find the story is about the same. There was opposition and dissent, of course, but it decreased very rapidly. You see the improvements at first introduced were such universal benefits that there could not be any serious complaint.
"By the time we had universal suffrage the women were more than ready for it, full of working plans to carry out, and rich by the experience of the first trials.
"By the time Socialism was generally adopted we had case after case of proven good in Socialistic methods; and also the instructive background of some failures."
"But the big men who ran the country to suit themselves in my time, they didn't give up without a struggle surely? You must have had some fighting," I said.
He smiled in cheerful reminiscence. "We had a good deal of noise, if that's what you mean. But there's no fighting to be done, with soldiers, if the soldiers won't fight. Our workingmen declined to shoot or to be shot any longer, and left the big capitalists to see what they could do alone."
"But they had the capital?"
"Not all of it. The revenues of the cities and of the United States Government are pretty considerable, especially when you save the seventy per cent, we used to spend on wars past and possible; and the ten or twenty more that went in waste and graft. With a Socialist State private Capital has no grip!"
"Did you confiscate it?"
"Did not have to. The people who were worth anything, swung into line and went to work like other people. Those that weren't were just let alone. Nobody has any respect for them now."
"You achieved Socialism without bloodshed?"